Shankar Vedantam

Antonio Pasqualeone, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me, Shankar.

Antonio, as a young man in your late teens and 20s, you were an aspiring actor.

I understand that you also like to write poetry.

You must have cut quite a romantic figure.

What kind of poetry did you write at this time of your life?

So I understand that you had a girlfriend at the time, someone that you cared about deeply.

But at one point, the relationship founded.

Did anyone get this serenade and this poetry reading on camera?

Because this would be one for the ages if someone recorded you.

I'm glad you didn't take his advice, Antonio.

Now, of course, you're far from the only person to have had a hard time with a breakup.

In the 2011 movie Crazy Stupid Love, the actor Steve Carell plays a character who is trying to get over a breakup.

Here he is talking to his ex, with whom he is still in love.

So, Antonio, you're a therapist.

Do you see examples of this kind of behavior in real life?

So if one model is basically people trying to plow ahead and not look back, you also have people who do the opposite, who basically are fixated on what happened in the past.

In the 2019 movie Marriage Story, we hear the voice of the actor Adam Driver, who plays Charlie, a man in the middle of a very nasty divorce.

In this clip, he's addressing his soon-to-be ex-wife.

Antonio, what do you hear when you hear that very dramatic scene?